


Don't Run Away, Don't Chase After

by mem0



Series: Klelijah Translations [1]
Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries & Related Fandoms, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: AU from TO 2x05, Dark, Half-Sibling Incest, Incest, M/M, TO season 2 AU, Translation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 22:51:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20090092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mem0/pseuds/mem0
Summary: Esther finds an improved way to prove to Elijah and Klaus that they should take her proposal and switch into human bodies. She locks the brothers in a magical trap made out of many interlacing realities. In order to escape, Klaus is forced to turn to desperate measures.Translation from the Russian (перевод с русского)





	Don't Run Away, Don't Chase After

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Twenty_One_Grams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twenty_One_Grams/gifts).
  * A translation of [Не убежать, не догнать](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3620583) by [Twenty_One_Grams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twenty_One_Grams/pseuds/Twenty_One_Grams). 

Klaus beats his fist against the wall – a brick crumbles under the force of the blow – and snarls powerlessly. He digs his fingers into his hair, paces circles around the room, snatching a bottle of bourbon on the go and gulping it down right from the neck. The alcohol burns the inside of his throat, but instead of wincing, Klaus takes another gulp. And another.

The bourbon runs out. The bottle flies into the wall, shattering against it with an unpleasant sound.

Klaus has really stepped in it. He’s not just neck-deep, or even ear-deep, in trouble, but stuck down to the very tip of his head. It’s been a long time since he’s been bogged down in such a crap position.

Esther enticed him into the latest of her traps, twisting him around her fingers like a stupid puppy. She made him believe her words so much that for a while Klaus even allowed for the possibility that he really would find Elijah, save him, and drag him home to explicitly explain to him why he shouldn’t play the hero and put himself in harm’s way.

But Elijah wasn’t in the crypt. There was only a skillfully-made illusion, and after he touched it Klaus was crushed with pain and thrown onto the floor to twitch pitifully in an attempt to stand. His brother’s silhouette dissolved in the air, and Klaus was nearly paralyzed by some sort of worthless witchy drug, clearly a mix of aconite and vervain.

His consciousness was fading away. Clinging onto it was becoming more and more difficult with each second, but Klaus had enough strength to dodge and bite at his mother’s hands when she sat down on her knees before him and gentle touched her warm fingers to his forehead. True, he missed, but it was still worth the try.

Esther – _what a kind soul _– stroked his hair so gently it was offensive, and, leaning closer, spoke:

“Listen to me carefully, son. You don’t have much time before you lose consciousness. What I’m going to tell you right now will be the key to coming back from where you’ll end up, so stop twitching and _listen._”

“Go to hell!” Klaus barely managed to wheeze out. He wanted to do more: to rip out the damned witch’s throat with his teeth. He didn’t care that she would just jump into a new body – it would still be worth it.

“There, where you’re going, you’ll find your brother,” Esther ignored his cursing. “But he won’t know that you have parted ways. You’ll find yourself in the labyrinth of your own consciousness, Niklaus, in a thousand parallel Universes. You’re free to do whatever you’d like in each one of them; those events will not affect what happens in the real world. But those Universes are endless, and your only way to escape their spiderweb is to break the cycle by forcing Elijah to _genuinely _renounce you_._”

It was embarrassing for Klaus to admit, even to himself, but the thought that such a thing was possible stung worse than the herbs that were poisoning his body.

“You need to understand that even your noble brother cannot love a monster like you always and forever. Despite his oath.” Esther’s fingertips traced his cheekbones: gently, carefully, repulsively. “You will finally destroy his love with your own hands, Niklaus. I believe in your ability to manage it. Every time that Elijah refuses to leave you behind, you will both be transferred into a new ring, where everything will start again from the beginning. Rather, you will start everything again – Elijah will not recall even a second of what has happened. You have no loopholes or escape routes, my dear, my unhappy son. You need to prove to your elder brother just how much you have rotted on the inside, otherwise you will both be trapped in intersecting illusions. This is the only way to make you both understand that you need purification and a new life, in bodies uncorrupted by sin.”

“Stupid woman,” by then Klaus could barely speak, but the panic rising in his chest and the fear clenching in his throat still gave him the power to move his lips: “What’s the point of this farce if Elijah is going to forget everything?!”

His consciousness had already almost left him: his vision was darkening and swimming, but he could catch the far-off sound of rustling leaves, in delightful harmony with the noise of the city. It smelt of warm asphalt.

“He will remember what happens in the last ring,” Esther smirked bitterly. “And afterwards the knowledge of what happened before that, all those repulsive deeds that you, I’m sure, will carry out, will return to him as well. Forgive me, Niklaus. The last thing on earth I want is to force you two to undergo such torment, but these are the necessary measures I’m forced to undertake for the salvation of my children. Have a good trip, my son.”

Esther pressed her dry lips to his forehead in a kiss, but Klaus couldn’t move at all – he just twitched weakly on the floor, and then all the sounds around him blended together into white noise, and darkness finally engulfed his vision.

***

Klaus exhales, torn and wheezing, and presses his fingers to his temples.

_He. Doesn’t know. What to do._

He expected something insane – space adventures or labyrinths, swarming with tentacled monsters – but he awoke in his own bedroom, dressed only in his underwear and covered by a blanket. As though nothing had happened, and his loving mother hadn’t forced him into a magical trance, sending him off on an endless journey across some goddamned universes. As though everything had just been a bad dream.

But Klaus has already gotten too good at differentiating his dreams from reality, and something incomprehensible tells even him: all that really did happen.

The door to the room opens slightly with a barely audible creak.

“Day drinking again?” Elijah raises a brow mockingly, resting his shoulder against the doorpost. Of course, even here, in this fake world, he looks flawless: boots so polished they shine, pants pleated perfectly, a dark-blue dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, with a few buttons undone at the top. Klaus quickly inspects his brother’s bare arms and then raises his gaze to his face.

For now, he has to play by Esther’s rules.

“If you want to ever stop being the world’s most unbelievable bore, you should take me for an example,” Klaus bares his teeth and reaches out for the next bottle.

Elijah rolls his eyes.

***

The decision seems obvious on the surface: go to Elijah and tell him that they’ve gotten into a mess, that they need to come up with a way to get out of what is quite possibly the most complicated trap they’ve ever fallen into. But that’s too simple, too obvious. There’s no way Esther could make such a stupid mistake.

Klaus draws back the blinds, locks the door closed, paces in circles about his room and thinks, thinks, thinks. Inside, he seethes, half with rage and half with indignation – he got caught like a complete idiot, and ended up in a situation where he has lost the necessary control.

To hell with it. He has to give it a try. It’s the only option that he can think of right now.

It’s not at all difficult to find Elijah. He is sitting in his room, in the armchair, legs crossed, with a glass of red wine and a book. He looks put together, chiseled, elegant – Klaus tries not to think “handsome,” because there’s too much truth to it – just as always.

“Niklaus,” his brother welcomes him. Rather than tearing himself away from his (apparently) unbelievably interesting reading, he merely salutes with the glass. How typical.

“Elijah,” Klaus greets in response, approaching and settling down comfortably in the nearby armchair. “We need to talk.”

Elijah puts away the book – slowly and tidily, smoothing the pages and carefully closing the book, and then conscientiously putting it down on the nearby table, where the glass follows shortly afterwards – and raises his gaze to look at Klaus, clasping his fingers on his knees in a lock:

“I’m all ears.”

“It has to do with our…”

Klaus cannot even say the word “mother.” It’s as though something heavy hits him in the chest, and his throat clenches. Of course, he tries to continue, but not a sound comes out. It’s as if Klaus is mute: he cannot move his lips or his tongue, and his vocal cords seem to be dying. He angrily clutches the chair’s armrests, hoping that Elijah will not notice his pause, but, of course, his brother does, and raises a brow curiously.

“Niklaus?”

“Forget it, I’ve reconsidered. I’ll handle it myself,” Klaus stands up from the armchair abruptly, earning a very disapproving look.

“Don’t you think that it would be better to share your news with me?” asks Elijah, somewhat irritated, rising in turn.

“No, brother, I’ve already said that I’ve reconsidered,” Klaus answers, trying to maintain the usual smirk on his face. “Is that really unusual coming from me?”

“No,” Elijah huffs, turning away. “Excellent. Do what you want. Handle it yourself.”

He doesn’t suspect how correct he is. Klaus has no choice but to handle this completely on his own. And it’s not as though he is not used to this way of doing things.

**2013\. MYSTIC FALLS, VIRGINIA.**

Klaus doesn’t want to get Rebekah involved in the situation, even despite the fact that she is just a projection created by magic. But he thinks that it could have the necessary affect on Elijah, so he makes up his mind to do it anyway.

His sister’s smile is just as wide and sunny here as in reality, and her hair shines in the light.

Klaus really has let go of all their squabbles and quarrels. He has no anger left towards her in his soul: the last of it flowed away at the moment when he put Hope, tightly wrapped in a blanket, in Rebekah’s arms. His anger was replaced by feelings late by a thousand years: calm love and affection. That’s good – it is exactly what blood relations should be like. Klaus knows that, and is still surprised that he managed to achieve something like that with someone in their family after all. That he managed to rebuild the thing he destroyed when his fingers first closed around Esther’s throat.

He thinks with a light sadness that he will never have something similar with Elijah. There are too many painful, wrong things between them – things that should never be between brothers. Klaus realized long ago what he felt for Elijah, and it is the darkest thing living in his long-rotten soul. The most awful thing that he is capable of imagining. He tries to think about it as rarely as possible, moving his unhealthy desires to the background. He even has the strength not to react when Elijah accidentally touches fingers to his neck or accidentally presses him against the wall, so close that it’s crowded even for the air in between them.

Klaus has to live with this, and because of that nothing good will ever come out his relationship with Elijah. What he would consider good doesn’t have the right to exist. Klaus managed to resign himself to that, but now it becomes unbelievably painful and bitter for him once more. Like it has not been in a long time.

Esther thought up the worst possible trial for him, without even knowing it herself. If Klaus escapes from here, he will tear out her throat. No, more than that: he will tear out her throat _with his teeth. _He will seize hold of her and bite and bite, until heat flows across his chin and the taste of blood settles on his tongue. He doesn’t care that Esther can jump into a new body; the desire to do her harm overcomes his common sense.

Rebekah hugs him when she sees him, but somewhat warily, as though avoiding him, not wanting – or not allowing herself – to open up completely. In this version of reality, they still haven’t reconciled. Rebekah doesn’t know that Klaus has let her go, has let her be free. Here, she’s waiting for him to stick a knife in her back. Maybe even literally. Klaus is a little happy about that. Esther said that she wouldn’t know and that she couldn’t find out what happens in the rings, but Klaus would be stupid to believe her words. Peace with Rebekah means that she’s living with Hope, and Klaus cannot risk Esther finding out about his daughter. Just in case Esther has access to this, then she will understand immediately the moment she sees Hope, and that will be the end for them all.

“Well, what progress,” he thinks to himself, settling down on a couch in the Salvatore brothers’ boarding house. “I’m learning to look on the bright side.”

“I didn’t expect to see you, Nik,” says Rebekah, looking at him with suspicion, and picks up a bottle of bourbon and a pair of tumblers. “Wasn’t your business in New Orleans too urgent and important for you to just abandon it?”

“My business in New Orleans can wait,” he answers, “if I want to visit my beloved sister.”

“What do you need?” Rebekah asks. She sets aside the tumblers, unfilled as they are, crossing her arms over her chest.

Of course. Smart, smart Bekah knows that he wouldn’t come to visit just like that. Naturally, she is correct. Klaus feels the silver blade’s weight in his sleeve. The blade which will very soon end up between his sister’s shoulder blades. Or, maybe, in her heart. However things go.

“Oh, nothing of the sort, believe me,” he stands up from the couch and takes a step towards her. Rebekah almost steps back, visibly tense, ready to flee at any moment.

“Don’t come closer,” she warns, barely restraining from showing her fangs. Does he really scare his own sister that much? Klaus likes what their relationship has become, but now he recalls why he tried to keep her scared. There’s something attractive in it – listening to how her pulse throbs faster, seeing how the veins rise up across her temples. It’s better than the same reaction from any prey. It’s better than the same reaction from anyone else. None of their relatives besides Rebekah were ever genuinely afraid of him. Finn despised everything that they were and spent the majority of his life in a wooden box. Kol was a little frightened of him, but mostly searched for his approval, trying to play his silly games at the same time. And Elijah… Klaus was always the one who was afraid of Elijah.

“I’m kidding.” He holds up his palms in a conciliatory gesture, laughing and sitting back down. He tries not to get distracted by the thrill of Rebekah’s fear, returning to more rational and relevant thoughts.

At first she stays in the same pose, eyes narrowed, biting on her lip, but after a few seconds she relaxes anyway and takes a deep breath. A hint at a smile appears on her lips. His sister nods and once again reaches out for the bottle. A shame.

A shame for her, of course. Klaus is besides her in the blink of an eye. The dagger sinks just as fast into Rebekah’s side.

She exhales convulsively, stares at him with hatred, and even manages to smash one of the tumblers about his head. Amber liquid pours down across his face. Klaus uses his tongue to collect its drops off his lips and smoothens Rebekah’s hair, watching how her skin gradually turns grey with black veins.

Now he just has to wait.

***

Elijah appears quickly – after just two days, which Klaus spends irritating Stefan, Damon and Elena with periodic appearances at their home, emptying the stores of alcohol in his own mansion and painting pictures. He enjoys those two days. He allows himself to relax: in this illusory reality he has nothing to do and no goals, except for the one, and in order to achieve it he needs to wait for his brother’s arrival.

Esther definitely tried to make everything as realistic as possible. It’s difficult for Klaus to admit it, but he can’t help but acknowledge her capabilities. Certainly not every witch could have created such a thing. Esther is probably one of a kind. They were unlucky to have gotten her as a mother. 

“Niklaus!” Elijah bursts into the workshop without knocking, irritated and with three day stubble, but looking just as flawless as always. “Would you care to tell me what’s going on?”

“And hello to you too,” Klaus smirks. “How’re you doing, brother?”

“Enough with the theatrics,” his brother snaps, approaching Klaus and unceremoniously tearing the paintbrush from his fingers. Several drops of dark burgundy paint hit the easel. “Why did you disappear from New Orleans, why haven’t you been responding to my calls, and why did I have to talk to the Salvatore boys, who decided that the only way to get rid of you was to call me?!”

Klaus can’t restrain his smirk. Well, even those kinds of things are possible here. The illusions exist even when he doesn’t see them, moreover – they lead independent lives and are capable of making decisions. Esther definitely deserves her due.

“I came back for our dear sister,” he says, setting the color palette down on the table. “If you’re so anxious to hear the reasons for my departure that you have the insolence to interrupt me.”

“Careful, Niklaus,” Elijah snarls in a warning tone, “watch your words. I have every right to interrupt you, because you disappeared into thin air at the very second when you were needed in New Orleans. That werewolf girl is pregnant with your child, do you understand that?”

“Oh, I understand that perfectly well, believe me,” Klaus bares his teeth. “And I so wanted darling Rebekah to join our little kiddy party. It’s too bad that she didn’t show any interest in following me.”

“What did you do with her?” Elijah is noticeably tense. Now he looks almost like Rebekah did right before Klaus drove the blade into her, except he’s feeling completely different emotions. Rebekah was ready to fling herself away from Klaus, Elijah – at him.

“She’s… resting,” he answers, without wiping the crooked smirk from his face, “if you know what I mean.”

“Again?!” Elijah raises his voice and clenches his fists. Looking at him, it’s obvious how angry he is, which is exactly what Klaus wanted.

“She deserved it.” He takes a rag and wipes his paint-stained fingers, but suddenly feels something pushing into his chest, and ends up pressed to the table on his back. Elijah holds him by the shoulder with one hand, squeezing painfully, while the other hand lays on the table, palm open, almost touching his hip. He’s close, too close. Klaus’s breathing flounders, and he nervously licks his lips. Yes, he has learned to ignore his impulses, but now, when his meeting with Rebekah has reopened the wound, it becomes damned difficult to do so. Klaus doesn’t continue immediately. He needs a few more moments to get his thoughts back on the right track and once more begin speaking:

“Rebekah refused to follow me. Obviously she doesn’t have anything to do, so why shouldn’t she spend a few decades in a coffin, learning her lesson? If the first, second and third times didn’t teach her anything.”

“Stop your idiotic games,” Elijah hisses in his ear. “Where did you hide the coffin?”

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to get it,” Klaus answers, rather hoarsely. “I took care to ensure that no one would have access to the coffin. I learned a few tricks from that old boy, Silas.”

At that, Elijah exhales harshly and moves away, one hand pushing him in the chest. Klaus is openly bluffing. No matter what, even in an illusion, he wouldn’t throw Rebekah’s coffin into the water reservoir, as Silas had once done to Stefan, locking him into a chained metal box and dropping him to the very bottom. Klaus has so much hatred in his soul that sometimes it even terrifies himself, but all the same, Rebekah didn’t deserve such an awful fate. Such a fate should be left for someone like Esther. And Klaus would happily put that plan into action, if only she were not too dangerous to leave alive.

In the past, he had already said that he had thrown the coffins with Rebekah, Kol, and Finn in them into the ocean. Elijah should have guessed that Klaus was once more lying through his teeth. But by all appearances, he does not realize that. He has pain and disappointment on his face, and he paces around the room in circles, digging into his hair with his fingers. Elijah jerks briefly, and, with a wave of the hand, knocks the easel onto the ground. The wet paint of the painting starts to spill off of the canvas in ugly, dirty streams.

It’s not a big deal if Elijah leaves now. Klaus hasn’t done anything _that _horrible, that hasn’t happened before. He merely repeated his own actions. He pressed once again against an old wound, using Rebekah for his own purposes. Elijah believed that Klaus was done with the daggers – it’s funny to know that in reality he drove one into Elijah’s heart – and now it’s clearly visible how irritated his brother is that it turned out otherwise. How _disappointed_ he is. His disappointment feels as though someone had driven a knife into Klaus’s lower stomach and twisted it several times.

It’s a bitter thought, but if Elijah leaves now, and the illusion fades away, then Klaus will return to reality with the same feeling. It’s not just bitter – it’s so loathsome that he wants to slip out of his skin. But he has no choice.

“You’ll show me right now where exactly you threw away the coffin,” Elijah says suddenly, once more dry and calm. “And I don’t care at all what that takes. We will do everything necessary in order to get it back. Even drain the reservoir. And after that we’ll fly back to New Orleans, even if I have to drag you by the collar or snap your neck.”

Klaus is surprised by his brother’s reaction. He isn’t sure what he feels more strongly in the moment – rage, because he needs to jump to the next ring, where he will have to be more inventive, or selfish joy that Elijah, again, once more, didn’t turn away from him.

In his ears, he starts to hear the same buzzing as he had back then, in the crypt.

**2007\. PORTLAND, OREGON.  
**

The telephone lying on the nightstand next to the bed rings at three o’clock at night, and Elijah reaches out for it without any particular enthusiasm. His unexpected awakening irritates him, even despite the fact that sleep is just an ingrained habit from living like a human that he can easily go without.

The number shining on the screen is not in his contacts, and Elijah frowns, displeased, raising himself up slightly on his elbows. His stomach cramps with an alarming premonition.

He clicks the button to accept the call:

“If you, whoever you are, are enough of an imbecile to call me in the middle of the night, I seriously recommend that you say your piece as quickly as possible. If you want to keep your head on your shoulders.”

“A new one would grow in.” Elijah could never mistake that voice for any other. “Hello, brother. How’re you doing?”

Klaus. _Klaus _is calling him, though they have been purposefully avoiding one another for the last four decades. He has the same voice, the same intonations, and Elijah can still perfectly picture his face down to the last line. Nervously swallowing, he stands up abruptly from the bed. The fingers with which he is holding the phone tremble, and Elijah grabs the receiver with his other hand.

“What do you need?” he asks curtly. Elijah is so angry that his fangs are on the point of dropping. His brother’s unbelievable, supernatural ability to drive him crazy in an instant, to rip off his mask of calmness, and get under his skin hasn’t gone anywhere. Forty years apart from one another is such a ridiculous triviality. It was stupid to think that he might have been able to erase Klaus from his subcortical brain over that time, but Elijah had hoped anyway (he had not thought of his brother for three days already – a great start, an unbelievable achievement, which crumbles to dust, because it’s impossible not to think about the person whose voice is sounding in your ears).

“Nothing in particular, I just missed you and wanted to chat with my beloved older brother,” Klaus’s voice openly oozes with self-satisfaction.

Elijah scoffs.

“And now try again, without the useless lies,” he says, already more calmly.

Klaus doesn’t answer for a few seconds, and Elijah carefully listens to his breathing in the receiver. He closes his eyes, gathers his own air, and counts to three.

“Go out onto the balcony.”

Short dial tones sound in the receiver, and Elijah throws the telephone onto the bed in irritation – he knows perfectly well what he will see outside the windows. _Who _he will see. Everything is so simple that it seems absurd. Elijah is able to make it so that even Klaus, with his network of witches who grovel before him, cannot find him. He goes all the way to the borders of the country, settles down in a state where his family has never lived before, chooses a city where it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, and a mangled bite on the neck would be considered an element of style. But Klaus finds him anyway – but before he didn’t even try to look, Elijah knows that for sure. He did everything in order to ensure that wouldn’t happen, and he knows perfectly well that his efforts were not in vain. There’s something fundamentally wrong with what’s going on, just as there is in the strange feeling pulling at his heart.

Elijah takes a deep breath, pulls on a t-shirt and goes to the balcony.

Klaus is standing under the windows, craning his neck and looking up expectantly. Just catching sight of Elijah draws his lips out into a wide smirk, and he takes a few steps forward. He is wearing a rain jacket with a high collar. Klaus has not changed at all, of course. And he shouldn’t have, but for some reason to see his brother looking the same as forty, one hundred, four hundred years ago, seems strange, even surreal. Elijah looks him over from head to toe, jumps down in one fast movement and lands nearby.

“Niklaus,” he pronounces in a calm voice. In fact, he is not calm in the least: his thoughts are jumping from one thing to another, and the impulse to pull Klaus to him in an embrace struggles with the desire to slam his head against the asphalt. Elijah does neither – just watches, attentively and studiously.

“Hello, brother,” Klaus bares his teeth in response, interlocking his fingers in his favorite gesture. He still does everything the same, and Elijah still remembers everything. It’s a stupid and unimportant trifle, making him lean in favor of an embrace rather than a blow. True, Elijah does not have a shred of doubt that in the coming minutes Klaus will make him change his mind.

“Will you tell me what brought you to me at this outrageous hour after several dozen years of estrangement?” Elijah asks, taking a few steps and circling around Klaus, who turns his head.

“You want me to lay everything out for you? But what about spending some brotherly time together? Are you really not even going to invite me into your new apartment? I heard that you have an exquisite interior, and that the bed… Oh, how soft the bed is.”

Elijah grinds his teeth in response. He doesn’t even want to think about how Klaus is aware that his interior is exquisite and his bed is soft, but he can assume that, most likely, his brother caught the girl that Elijah brought home the previous weekend and extracted the necessary information from her. Elijah should have made her forget everything that had happened, not just the way to the apartment. He clearly made a mistake there.

“Well, alright, brother, if you want to be your normal boring self,” Klaus laughs, turning and taking a step towards him, “then when am I to refuse you that pleasure? I found her.”

Elijah freezes on the spot as though rooted to the ground, and his breath catches. He understands perfectly well who his brother has in mind when he says “her” – there is no other “her,” who one of them would want to find. There’s only Katerina, _Katherine, _the undying memory of the scent of her hair, and the hole in his heart that nothing can fill.

Elijah does not want Katerina to die, and if she comes across Klaus then she will not avoid that fate. Klaus does not forgive, Klaus does not pardon. Klaus takes what he needs, regardless of others, unless it is profitable for him. Elijah feels how his chronic, bitter rage and disappointment begin to rise up within him. An almost unbearable desire to slam Klaus against the ground until blood pours out across his temples rises within him.

“Don’t you dare touch her,” he hisses, “you hear?”

“And what if I do?” Klaus is simply shining with self-satisfaction, which just begs to be wiped from his face with fists. “You can’t kill me. Hell, you can’t even really hurt me.”

“Shall we find out?” Elijah growls, throwing himself forward. He grabs Klaus by the cuffs of his rain jacket, throws him harshly against the nearest wall, pressing his own body against him, and places one elbow at his throat, strangling.

Klaus is laughing in his face, and that laughter is interrupted by a suffocated cough. Elijah removes his elbow and grabs Klaus by the throat with his fingers instead, using a leg to hold down his hip so that he can’t have the ability to escape. 

His brother is so close now that Elijah can feel his wheezing breath and catches the sharp smell of his cologne. It would be so simple – to reach out forward with his hand, bury it in his brother’s ribcage, force through the ribs and catch the heart between his fingers. To feel how it would beat between them, squeeze it tighter and pull it to himself, tearing the aorta. Klaus will just stand back up after a few hours anyway, as though nothing had happened, and his own brother had not torn the living – is it living? They are, after all, the walking dead – heart out of his chest.

These thoughts make Elijah’s head spin, his mouth dries, and his lower stomach starts to weigh heavy. He abruptly lets go of Klaus, unclenching his fingers and taking several steps backwards. The other hits the wall with his back, bares his teeth again, clears his throat and adjusts his dislodged rain jacket.

“You haven’t convinced me,” he says, massaging his neck with a palm. “You know that you can’t really do me harm. I’ll regenerate.”

“Harm doesn’t have to be physical,” Elijah says through clenched teeth, trying to chase the persistent images out of his head.

At this, Klaus finally jumps up. A strange expression that Elijah does not completely understand, but seems to look like a mix of fear and hope, slips fleetingly across his face. But hope and fear don’t really go particularly well with one another. Klaus quickly returns to his normal self, readjusts the rain jacket once more, flicking invisible dirt off of it, and puts his hands behind his back.

“And how are you planning to do me some sort of non-physical harm? Will you renounce me? Will you refuse to call me your brother?”

Elijah bites his lip. He won’t be able to forgive Klaus for killing Katerina, but he also won’t be able to renounce him. Elijah does not throw around his words lightly, and does not take them back once said. Saying “always and forever,” he binds himself just so – always and forever. He runs off to the other end of the country, but a red string stretches on behind him, the second end of which is tightened around Klaus’s neck.

Elijah cannot imagine his existence without him. Even if they don’t see each other for dozens of years, still his brother always, _always and forever, _stays under his skin, deeper than venom in his veins, poison in his bones, or acid in his lungs.

“No,” Elijah answers quietly, looking straight into the mocking eyes. “You know perfectly well that I won’t.”

Elijah feels pained. Elijah feels sad. Elijah wants to slip out of his skin and throw up his own insides. He has broken glass in his throat and sharp needles in his eyes: this is how it feels to see Klaus, returning after forty years in order to rattle his soul and extract the blunted feelings from within him.

It seems that his brother gets angry at that response. Elijah does not understand why – his brother had always been fervent with regards to loyalty, thinking that both Elijah and Rebekah, and even Finn and Kol, were obligated to stay by his side no matter what. He hates even mentioning the possibility that one of them might leave him. When Elijah left, he threw himself into searching for him, unleashed all his bloodhounds, and took a long time to settle down. In the end he let him go despite that, but Elijah is certain: only because both of them know perfectly well that despite their many years of quarrels, Elijah will go back to Klaus if Klaus ever ends up in trouble. Elijah always goes back to Klaus, Klaus always allows him to come stupidly close, and then beats his head against the wall and he, Elijah, bloodied, head smashed, gets up and crawls back away. That is their relationship. They’ve gotten used to it. They don’t know anything else.

Their absurd level of dependence doesn’t give them a genuine chance to leave one another. They are called back like magnets. They both know that, just as they know that they have the power to destroy everything. And Klaus is now provoking him to the final step, trying to force him to finally destroy the cursed string tying them together.

It’s strange and abnormal, but when has their family ever practiced normality? Elijah looks at Klaus so intently that it seems as though the man’s silhouette is fading into grey and then dissolving completely, just like the whole world around them. It turns blurry, begins to crack, and shatters into small pieces, falling into a dark red whirlwind.

Elijah blinks several times and everything returns to normal. Klaus stands across from him, and Elijah looks at him and cannot turn away his gaze.

“What will you do if I kill that useless little trash?” Klaus asks, calmly and evenly.

“I will chase you to the edge of the universe, rip out your heart, and throw it over that edge,” answers Elijah in the same way.

“I’ll get up and go off again.”

“I’ll follow you. I’ll become worse than a Hunter’s ghost.”

“But you won’t leave.”

“I won’t leave. I’ll stay with you forever.”

“Idiot.”

“I know.”

Klaus turns around abruptly and walks away. Elijah stays standing on the roadway, clenching and unclenching his fists, unable to go after his brother right now. After all, there’s not even any reason for him to do so – the string stretches out behind Klaus with every one of his steps, and Elijah thinks that he can see how it unwinds along the road in a bright red track.

The world swims before his eyes and for some reason he hears buzzing in his ears.

**2010\. MYSTIC FALLS, VIRGINIA.  
**

Klaus hates jumping from one ring to the next. The transition is not painful, exactly, but it’s terribly unpleasant. He is not used to things like head pain or nausea, which are the exact feelings provoked by the transition, and in order to orient himself and figure out where exactly he has been dropped takes Klaus more time than he would like. He can’t do anything about it, and that’s just one more drop in the sea of his powerlessness.

Every time it becomes even worse. Waking up on a bed in a vaguely familiar rooms, he rolls over onto his side, clenches his t-shirt to his chest, and after a fit of muffled coughing, spits blood onto the nearby nightstand, splattering the alarm clock. Swearing, he wipes his mouth with the back side of his palm and suddenly realizes that the palm is not his own.

“What on earth,” Klaus mutters, getting up off the bed with difficulty and looking around. The apartment is quite small. It obviously belongs to a bachelor, without a hint of luxury. On a table in the living room several boxes of Chinese food are lying about – what unbelievably bad taste – and an open bottle of cheap whiskey sits on the counter.

Klaus, beginning to vaguely recognize his surroundings, goes to the bathroom and cannot hold back his laughter upon seeing his reflection in the mirror.

Alaric Saltzman, unlucky vampire haunter who almost killed Klaus’s entire family thanks to the influence of that same Esther, may she rot, looks back at him. If Klaus is inside of Alaric’s body, that means that he’s been thrown back to where he didn’t want to return. He is preparing for the ritual, Elena Gilbert is still a human, and Elijah, having hidden from him for several dozen years, is making a deal with her and the Salvatore brothers.

Klaus smirks and runs a palm across his face, noting with indifference that Alaric could use to shave more often.

The successfully conducted ritual, which allowed him to free his wolf side and, at last, receive accept to the power of the hybrid, was one of the most important moments of his life. Klaus will never forget the burning, wicked joy that overflowed in his chest when he drained all of Elena’s blood to the last drop, but he doesn’t want to relive it.

He remembers how Elijah’s fingers clenched around his heart, how his eyes shone and his mouth twisted, either out of pain and regret or joy and triumph. Elijah only released him because Klaus admitted that he didn’t throw Rebekah, Kol and Finn’s coffins to the bottom of the sea. Elijah spared him in order to have the possibility of reuniting with his family. Klaus is afraid to find out what would have happened if he had kept silent back then.

But their mother has her own ideas about what is good for her children, and so Klaus, apparently, still has to deal with everything that he has been trying so diligently to push as far away as he can for the last several years.

He takes a deep breath and is heading for the living room for that very same bottle of obviously crappy whisky when there comes a knock at the door. Klaus tenses up – it’s unlikely that anyone who’s even mildly sympathetic to him would come, but Mystic Fall’s little heroes still don’t know that a different consciousness is occupying Alaric’s body. Klaus doesn’t intend to rewrite the script of events, even though he could change what happened and avoid his previous errors. Those things don’t mean anything, because he’s in an illusory world where the only real person is Elijah. Besides Klaus himself, of course.

He will repeat everything exactly as it happened four years ago. He will take the same steps, make the same mistakes, and everything will lead to Elijah holding his head against that same rock, to that same fire raging about them, to that same sticky fear clawing at him that in just a few seconds his own brother will rip out his heart (a damned ironic way to die, since Klaus’s heart has always been Elijah’s, has hung off his leash, has lain in the pocket of his jacket, has beat in his fingers).

This is not the time to waste his energy on petty ambitions and contrive one illusion in the place of another. Klaus should behave himself accordingly and pretend to be Alaric. He huffs and grabs an already full glass of whiskey off of the counter – completely in character.

Damon is standing behind the door, and Klaus is surprised that he hadn’t guessed immediately – who else would drag himself over to Alaric’s late at night? The sight of the Salvatore boy makes him want to grimace, or just kick the haughty bastard out the door, but Klaus remembers that these two seem to consider each other best friends. It’s touching, especially considering that in just a few years the only things left of Alaric will be his bones and tombstone, while Damon will end up alone again with his pathetic love for a silly little doppelganger girl.

So what, but Klaus can sympathize with a pathetic love.

***

Klaus thinks that absolutely everything around him is on fire. He sees only the tongues of red-yellow flames, devouring the grass, and Elijah’s distorted face, he feels only the heat, licking his skin, and the fingers, tightly clenching his heart. The world fades and vanishes, leaving only a moment that has already happened and which is not actually happening. All this is just a well-made illusion, and Klaus wishes that it were thing burning.

Reflections of the fire dance in Elijah’s eyes. He squeezes his fingers more tightly around Klaus’s heart and leans closer, while Klaus coughs hoarsely – it hurts, it damn hurts. He has one foot in the tomb. His death won’t be real, but if Elijah goes through with it, then he doesn’t know how he can keep living…

“In the name of our family, Niklaus,” Elijah starts, turning his hand, and Klaus hisses from the pain.

Now he is supposed to say that he didn’t toss their siblings into the ocean. That they are alive, that he can take Elijah to them, that he gives him his word. It’s a script, written out a long time ago and already played out, that he doesn’t follow now: he doesn’t say a word.

Klaus looks at Elijah. Looks at the rage-distorted lines of his face, the locks of hair knocked out of his perfect haircut, his half-open lips, the drop of sweat flowing across his temple.

He shouldn’t do anything, he should just lie there limply, but he cannot contain himself and clasps the hand that his brother has plunged into his chest with his own, firmly grasping it between his fingers.

And Elijah delays. Elijah looks at him, and his face softens, the rage turns to pain and fear. Klaus hears Bonnie and Stefan shouting somewhere nearby: it seems like they are promising to wipe even Elijah off the face of the Earth if the man doesn’t fulfil his part of the death this very minute. Idiots. Even if they managed to drive Klaus into this trap, if he showed weakness by failing to have considered all possible scenarios, Elijah will never allow such a thing. There’s no way they’ll be able to kill him, no matter what.

Klaus closes his eyes. The fact that Elijah is hesitating still does not mean that he will stop. Right now, any minute, any second, it will happen. Esther’s curse will finally be destroyed. They will break free and everything will be okay, but nothing will ever be the same.

“I’m sorry.” He hears his brother’s shaking voice and squeezes his eyes shut even tighter, preparing to part with his fake life.

But for some reason there is no pain. Just strong, warm hands winding about him, the feeling of running, speed. Just like last time. Elijah doesn’t take the last step. Elijah doesn’t kill him.

Elijah throws him down on the ground. Klaus painfully hits his head on the stone, and then feels the weight of someone else’s body on his hips, and blows begin to rain down upon him. Elijah punches him, turning his face to mush – his lips crack, his mouth fills with blood, and his vision darkens. Klaus feels his brother shaking, hears his hysterical, broken sobs.

Elijah never cries, just as Klaus never cries, but now neither of them hold back.

Klaus raises a shaking hand and intercepts Elijah’s fist before it can meet his face for the latest time, and presses his lips to the broken knuckles.

Reality starts to swim around him, dissipates, breaks apart.

Klaus doesn’t want to admit it to himself, but he’s happy. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t work. He will think up something else. He is already used to hearing the buzzing in his ears.

**PRESENT DAY. NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA.**

Elijah leans against the handrails of the open balcony and breathes in deeply. At night it’s completely different from during the day. During the day, Crescent City smells too strongly: of the meat being prepared right on the streets, of the sweat-covered street musicians’ loose shirts, of the light veil of perfume on young girls in frivolous dresses. Elijah doesn’t really like those smells. He prefers the smells of the night.

Bourbon, sex on the street, and sweetly-smelling flowers, presented to those same young beauties that shrug their admirers’ jackets onto their skinny shoulders at night and wrap themselves up, smiling. Some of them have lips painted not with lipstick, but with real blood. There are too many vampires in New Orleans for Elijah’s taste. He would prefer to meet less of his indirect descendants, but they’re not the one making the rules. Just think, absolutely each one of these elegant bloodsuckers is descended somehow or another from him or one of his siblings. The awareness of that fact sometimes makes his head spin more than the strongest alcohol.

Yesterday, Klaus came home with bruises under his eyes and sweat on his brow, spread open his arms, and joyfully announced with a wide smile: “Dear brother, I’ve caught an awfully foul cold and I’ll kick it soon.” And he didn’t even find time to wait for a response – he immediately set off for his room. Climbing the stairs, he hung to the banisters with trembling fingers, as though his life, which he had just enthusiastically promised that he would soon leave behind, depended on it. In the middle of the staircase he tripped, almost collapsed, burst into laughter and calmly went onwards.

Elijah, to his own shame, did not manage to react. All he managed to do was endow his receding brother’s back with the type of gaze reserved for completely hopeless idiots.

A cold? Seriously?

If Klaus had told him that he had suddenly decided to return to his plan for the enslavement of the Earth, then Elijah would have been a lot less surprised. Over the course of a millennium he had learned to expect absolutely anything from his brother. Except for meaningless stupidity.

Catching a hold of himself, he set off after Klaus, who, as it turned out, had successfully made it to his room and was now reclining – you couldn’t put it otherwise – on the bed, wrapped up in a ridiculously large number of blankets and surrounded by almost a hundred pillows. Klaus had taken off his shirt, and Elijah noticed that his chest was shining with sweat.

“I’m dying,” Klaus joyously repeated, picking up a glass of water from the table near the bed, “isn’t that great?”

Elijah wouldn’t listen to that nonsense – he turned around and left, barely containing the impulse to slam the door. He didn’t have the faintest desire to listen to those kind of idiotic pronouncements from his brother, who, despite all his faults, had never been an idiot.

Only it turned out that Klaus wasn’t lying or talking nonsense. Today he had paled horribly, and the self-satisfied smile of the previous day had almost completely left his face. Elijah started to worry.

A dark, vile premonition began to creep up in his chest, right in the heart – as though something black, evil, alien and wrong was ensnaring his insides and squeezing them, as though saying: “You should be worried.”

Of course he should be. They are Originals, they are not supposed to get sick. But now Klaus is announcing that he _caught a cold _that will kill him. The picture just doesn’t make any sense, it’s absurd to the point of impossibility. Either his brother has some new wicked plan, the world has gone mad, or Elijah himself has. The first option is the most likely.

Elijah approaches Klaus again and brings him water. While the other drinks in large, thirsty gulps, he holds his head, for some reason digging fingers into his wiry hair. Elijah offers him blood, but Klaus decisively refuses. It is may very well be the first time that Elijah can remember. Klaus has always enjoyed blood more than all the rest of their family, but now he says: “No, I don’t need it, I’m fine as it is.”

Fine. With cloudy eyes, lips that are dry even after drinking water and sweat on his brow, he’s _fine. _

“Niklaus, tell me what’s happening,” Elijah says through clenched teeth, beating a pillow for his theatrically feeble brother, “or I’ll snap your neck.”

“Please don’t deny yourself that pleasure,” his brother bares his teeth, settling himself more comfortably on the bed. “I’m not exactly enjoying my current condition.”

“You wouldn’t say so by the look of you,” Elijah throws out coldly, getting irritated. “You look very well satisfied.”

“I am very well satisfied that my transitory existence will soon end, but I was never a particular lover of excruciating agony, you know.” Klaus pulls the blanket up to his chin, and then, having given it a thought, adds: “Unless, of course, it’s someone else struggling in it.”

It’s so difficult for Elijah to believe that the situation is real that he just silently tucks Klaus’s blanket in and involuntarily rubs at his own bristly cheekbones.

Klaus’s gleaming eyes look out from under the blankets.

“If you don’t stop playing the fool I’ll be forced to turn to the witches, Niklaus,” Elijah says tiredly. “Right now you look like a vampire bitten by a werewolf, but their poison doesn’t work on you. I don’t have the faintest idea what’s happening to you, and you aren’t rushing to explain yourself.”

“I already said,” Klaus mutters in response, moving a bit closer, and he exudes a noticeably unhealthy heat, “that I caught a cold. A magical hybrid cold. It’s killing me, end of story.”

If his brother didn’t look so pathetic, Elijah would have hit him.

“Wonderful,” he hisses, standing abruptly. “I’ll see to it that you’ll be fed and maintained, while I’ll go pay Davina a visit. Maybe she can knock you out of this idiocy.”

Elijah heads for the door, but Klaus’s unexpectedly serious voice stops him.

“She won’t help. Don’t go.”

Elijah wants to threaten to rip out Klaus’s heart – if only it would help – and feed it to the dogs. Anything for the man to finally start talking normally, for him to admit his game. Because he knows perfectly well what’s happening to him – Elijah can see it in his eyes. Does he really think that his own brother won’t notice anything and will just accept the pretense at face value?

Elijah clenches and unclenches his fingers, and turns again towards Klaus, who is sitting on the bed, having slid forward – the blankets have slipped away, revealing his naked torso and his hands, folded on his knees, with protruding veins. The expression on his face is unreadable. Elijah has no idea what to do. Hiding his hands in his pockets, he steps forward:

“And why should I listen to you all of a sudden? You’ve been doing nothing but shamelessly lying to me for two days.”

“Look, I’m telling you, the witches won’t help you. You don’t have to go: no matter what you won’t find a cure. And you know why? Because I don’t want you to look.”

If Elijah’s heart actually pulsed then it would have just missed a beat.

“Klaus,” he says in warning, “you haven’t happened to forget that you’re immortal, have you?”

“Huh, you know, yes, it slipped my mind,” his brother snarks in response. “I’m not that immortal. Don’t ask, alright? It has to be like this. Just forget it.”

“I’m off,” Elijah snaps back. “Should I give Davina your regards?”

Klaus turns out not to be as weak as he seems – he jumps up from the bed in one abrupt motion, pushes Elijah to the wall and clamps an elbow over his throat, glaring, enraged. Elijah tilts his head upwards to breathe more easily, and looks his brother over from top to bottom, pursing his lips. He doesn’t say a word. Klaus is silent as well. Elijah feels the heat coming off of him, and the scent of sickness and weakness hits his nose. Elijah notes inopportunely that anger turns out to look terribly good on Klaus.

But this is not the time to think about such things – it’s _never _the time to – and Elijah clasps Klaus’s wrist, saying “let go” without words.

And Klaus lets go. He takes a few steps back, returns to the bed and once again climbs under those absurd blankets of his. How many are there, anyway, a hundred?

“Alright, do it your way. Will you bring me some fruit? I want apples.”

Elijah nods and goes to the kitchen.

His sense of the unreality of the situation does not disappear. Elijah feels surprisingly lost and unsettled. Something is wrong with this whole picture. It looks like a theatrical production that he’s being forced to participate in for some reason.

Elijah is so unfocused that he manages to slash his own fingers with the knife while cutting fruits. He hisses with irritation, raising the hand to his face. The deep cut heals over in mere seconds.

A brownish spot of blood remains on the small apple slice. Without really thinking about it, Elijah throws that piece into the bowl with the rest.

First were fruits, then wine, and finally blood, poured into a dusty bottle of thick glass, and raw meat placed on a silver dish. Klaus is behaving himself simply repulsively: he flings out requests and demands, whines, complains either about the heat or the cold, but nonetheless doesn’t say a think about the nature of his “sickness.” He doesn’t allow Elijah to go to the witches either. He doesn’t even let him call Davina, much less meet with her. He doesn’t let Elijah go away for long, hanging onto his arms and throwing around his heated, unhealthy gazes.

A fickle child. Elijah wouldn’t have guessed that he would see this side of his brother again. After all, that was left behind long ago, at the very beginning of their human lives, and is only now coming out to the surface once more for some reason.

Instead of getting irritated by such foolishness, Elijah merely indulges it. He is too scared that Klaus _really _will die, that his words aren’t just empty sounds, aren’t just the latest mind game for achieving his goals.

There’s no one else nearby; they’re already on their third month of living on their own in the old, dusty mansion: Hayley is reveling in her own unhappiness, Marcel doesn’t risk crossing the river, Camille, reasonably, is keeping her distance from them, and Elijah’s conscience won’t let him call Rebekah. His sister left for a reason and they gave her Hope for a reason. He can’t trouble her, even in this kind of situation. _Especially _in this kind of situation – since she’ll come running right back, she’s a good girl with a big heart. It’s funny, but after so many years Elijah still calls her a girl.

“Have you not gotten tired of me yet?” Klaus asks venomously, spitting out blood into a handkerchief.

“Terribly tired,” Elijah answers, taking a clean one out of his breast pocket and stretching it out to his coughing brother.

The coughing sounds unbelievably vile – wet and gurgling as though it’s coming from somewhere near his breastbone. The blood only adds to the picture, as though adding in the last bright scarlet stroke.

Klaus’s eyes are no longer quite alive. Everything inside of Elijah starts to get colder, while some black, alien thing squeezes its tentacles tighter around his heart.

He puts his palm on his brother’s forehead. It’s hot. He tucks away the locks of hair that have gotten stuck to Klaus’s drenched skin and barely restrains himself from pressing his lips to it.

“Stop it,” Klaus suddenly hisses, pushing away his hand and irritably looking up at him from below as though Elijah had done something unpleasant or forbidden. “You’re making too much of a fuss about me. You should go already, I’m not keeping you here.”

“You’re not keeping me here,” Elijah snorts disbelievingly, “and not asking me almost every hour to fulfil the latest of your whims. Of course not. Relax, Niklaus, I’m not going anywhere.”

“But you should,” the other angrily grinds his teeth. “You… If you stay any longer then you’ll catch my disease. And you’ll kick it too. Or is that what you’re aiming for?”

Klaus opens his eyes wide and stares as though he himself is surprised by the words falling off his tongue. He can’t be trusted even for a second, not with that facial expression, not with that surprisingly mediocre lie.

Elijah nods shortly and starts to unhurriedly undo the buttons on his jacket.

“What are you doing?” Klaus asks suspiciously, clinging to one of his stupid blankets.

“Nothing really,” Elijah answers calmly, pulling the jacket from his shoulders and carefully hanging it on the spine of a nearby chair.

Klaus doesn’t answer, just keeps watching him, looking surprised and somehow hounded.

Elijah rolls of the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows – Klaus doesn’t tear his gaze away – pulls his shoes off of his feet, and then lies down on the bed, right above the blankets, and crosses his legs. Klaus tries to move away, but Elijah doesn’t let him – he grabs his brother imperiously by the neck and pulls him towards himself. He pulls him close and holds him tight. Klaus twitches, hisses, even beats against his chest with an open palm, but doesn’t use any real force. If he wanted to, he could easily fling Elijah out of his bed – even into the neighboring room – but now he only fidgets, and then powerlessly subsides, as though giving up, and seizes hold of the collar of Elijah’s shirt with shaking fingers.

“Idiot,” he whispers hoarsely, “you ruined everything. Again.”

Elijah doesn’t have the fainted idea what Klaus is talking about, and blames everything, cursing, on the fever. He will wait until his brother falls asleep and then he’ll contact Davina anyway.

Elijah presses a short kiss to the top of Klaus’s head and closes his eyes. As he falls asleep, his ears are filled with buzzing.

**PRESENT DAY. NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA.**

When Elijah enters the club, he feels a physical need to vomit.

One would think he should’ve seen everything over the course of his life, but for some reason the picture before him puts him in a state of primal horror, penetrating right into his heart and lungs, tearing them dryly and leaving him unable to breathe. He needs to cover his mouth with a handkerchief.

The soles of his feet slide across the wet, dirty floor, and Elijah almost slips. He manages nonetheless to maintain his balance, and with a mix of disgust, fear and disbelief looks at a torn up corpse, seated with its back to the wall. If Elijah had fallen, then his face would have slammed right into its open stomach, staining in the bile and blood. Just the thought leads a lump of vomit to rise in his throat.

“Niklaus!” He calls in a treacherously trembling voice, taking several more steps forward. He needs to step over the arm of some girl – the flesh of her skin has come apart and the white bone is clearly visible. Elijah cannot imagine with what ecstasy Klaus had to have drunken from that girl for her to have desiccated to such an extent, and prefers not to think about it.

He can’t hear anything in the club except for the electronic music playing in the distance. The silence lies heavy on his ears. He steps over yet another corpse – this time a boy’s, whose white shirt is completely soaked with blood from his neck – and calls again:

“Niklaus, I know that you’re here. There’s no point in hiding.”

The scent of fresh blood filling the air enters his nostrils and leaves him dizzy. His fangs drop all on their own, and Elijah needs several seconds in order to calm himself and conquer the desire to sink into the torn wrist of the latest victim of his brother’s that lies across his path.

“Niklaus!”

Elijah barely suppresses the low roar tearing out of his throat when the latest broken body falls down on him from the second floor. The girl’s carotid artery is bitten through, and a train of bright crimson blood comes flying after her, a few drops of which fall onto Elijah’s lips. Instead of licking them off, he cleans his mouth with a handkerchief.

“Niklaus!” Elijah kicks another completely unrecognizable body away to the side. It hits the wall and the moist sound of breaking skull bones is clearly audible. Apparently, Elijah just aided his brother in splattering the walls of the club with human brains. What a pity.

With each step the bass beats even harder, the music is more clearly audible, and Elijah has no doubts about what he will see in the main hall. 

Klaus is dancing on the stage, hands behind his head and moving his hips to the beat of the music. He is covered in blood almost from head to toe, his jacket and t-shirt are completely soaked in it. Every step he takes leaves behind a red track on the floor.

Klaus right now is incredibly handsome. His eyes are closed, his hair is disheveled, and he is smiling, showing teeth. As though the situation is absolutely normal. He even has his own impartial audience of corpses seated in a row. Elijah notices cocktail glasses in the hands of several of the dead.

His soles slip across the wet floor again. He doesn’t understand how Klaus can dance on blood without losing his balance for even a second.

Elijah slowly approaches the stage, as though in some kind of trance. The picture before him blurs. For some reason he sees himself in a completely different place, powerlessly dangling from chains, wrists grated by metal, fine drops of sweat and hair clinging to his forehead. He also sees Klaus. His lips are moving: he is saying something unbelievably important, not just for this vision, but also for the present, but Elijah can’t make out the words. Elijah can’t even reach out a hand to him to touch his cheekbones, to run his fingers along his cheek. He can’t do anything at all, because it’s just the fruit of his sick imagination, while reality… Reality is completely different.

When Elijah returns to his senses, he discovers himself dancing alongside Klaus. At some point unbeknown to him they had both thrown away their jackets, and they are moving their hips in the same rhythm, gazes fixed on one another.

Elijah rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and bites his lower lip with jutting fangs. He rips completely through the thin skin, and a fine stream of blood flows down across his chin, which he collects on his tongue. Klaus is paying careful attention to each of his movements.

Elijah blinks away the veil before his eyes and asks hoarsely:

“What on earth? What did these people do to you?”

“Nothing,” Klaus shrugs his shoulders in response, “absolutely nothing at all. They were just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place in the wrong time.”

He approaches the edge of the stage and sinks his hand into the laceration on the neck of one of the dead men. He slowly licks his fingers clean. Then he turns to Elijah, making an inviting gesture.

Elijah has gone too long making due on animal blood and donor packets from medical centers. It takes extreme difficulty to hold himself together and not give in to the provocation.

The scene is terribly absurd. It’s so stupid that it’s hard to believe in its veracity. Elijah feels as though he’s in some parallel, artificially-created world. He only needs to make a wish and all the deformed corpses will immediately turn into living people. The girl with the broken neck will stand up and smile her charming smile. The boy torn in half will pick up his own insides and set off to dance. The barman will start to juggle tequila bottles and his severed head. Even that picture seems more real than the current situation.

Klaus rocks his hips once more, looking him straight in the eye while doing so – unbelievably blatant and vulgar, with a light smirk on his red-smeared lips. Elijah goes closer to him.

“You’re depraved and sick,” he says quietly, knowing that his brother will hear anyway, even through the music, “you killed several hundred people that didn’t deserve it.”

“I’m depraved and sick,” Klaus agrees, “I killed several hundred people that didn’t deserve it.”

Klaus’s fingers caress the air near Elijah’s waist.

“But it’s too late for you to fix this,” he says calmly, while his hands move somewhere near those same hips, and Elijah works strenuously to breath evenly. “They’re all dead. You can’t do anything.”

“Just tell me, what on earth,” Elijah squeezes out, almost touching Klaus. “This is too unusual and unfounded even for you. I don’t understand what’s happening, but I don’t believe that you did this for no reason, just because you suddenly wanted to gnaw through a few throats.”

Klaus smirks but Elijah continues, unruffled (or it just seems that way to him):

“You had a motive. Tell me.”

Klaus pulls a face mockingly, his eyes saying that he didn’t have a motive, but Elijah refuses to believe it. The feeling that all of this is just a well-assembled production that is impossible to trust still doesn’t leave him. An aching pain at the back of his head makes itself known, scratching crooked nails across his skull from within.

Elijah moves closer to Klaus, and this time really does touch his cheek: softly, almost weightlessly, but Klaus nevertheless visibly tenses and rolls backwards. Elijah only hums. He lightly runs fingers along Klaus’s cheekbone, then removes his hand.

“No motive, brother,” Klaus finally answers. “Just the pure craving for murder.”

“Well, of course,” Elijah snorts. “You are too smart to quench your ‘pure craving for murder’ in such scales. I don’t believe you.”

Elijah takes several steps towards Klaus, puts a palm on his neck, powerfully and authoritatively, pressing a little harder with his fingers than he has to. He pulls Klaus closer to himself and whispers right into his ear, lips touching the lobe:

“I don’t believe you at all. You’re bluffing. I don’t know why you needed this, but I think I have never been so sure that everything happening around me is a lie.”

Klaus nearly jumps into the air at those words. His eyes fly open wide and his hands, lying on Elijah’s shoulders – and when did that happen? – start to shake. He looks shaken, but also joyful for some reason, and Elijah reads something similar to hope in his gaze.

“You think that everything around us is a lie?” He asks attentively, stopping his dancing. Elijah also stops. They stand in the middle of the blood-covered stage, staring straight at one another and breathing heavily. An absurdity.

Elijah moves a step backwards. He prefers to ignore how Klaus unwittingly moves to follow.

“Yes,” he answers, after a long pause. “It’s too theatrical.”

“Exactly!” Klaus almost shouts out. “Think, Elijah. Please, think. What isn’t right here, and why? What seems out of place to you?”

After these words he frowns and exhales shortly, as though punched in the gut, but quickly overcomes the pain. So quickly that one could have missed it, but Elijah has known Klaus for too long not to notice such a thing.

“What’s happening?” He asks tensely, unable to erase from his mind the expression on his brother’s face. Klaus looked as though it was physically painful for him to ask those questions, as though they burned his throat from the inside.

“Elijah, think,” Klaus wheezes, clutching at his throat and coughing. “Think, for god’s sake. It has never been this important.”

Elijah listens to him. Thinks, analyzes. He looks around him once more, one hundred times more.

_What’s not right? Why?_

It takes a few minutes, but Elijah nevertheless realizes, and the realization is so strikingly bright that it seems it could blind him.

He takes a deep breath before taking Klaus by the elbow and saying:

“Don’t even try to push me away. You decided to test me? No. It’s not that easy. I won’t go away, don’t get your hopes up.”

Elijah smiles, but Klaus growls irritably, tears himself away from Elijah’s grasp and in one motion chops the head off of one of the corpses. Elijah’s vision begins to swim and he hears a buzzing in his ears.

***

Klaus thinks that there’s a thick glass was between him and Elijah. Usually those kinds of walls don’t let sound through to either side, but with them it works otherwise: Klaus hears and understands everything, but Elijah doesn’t have the even the slightest understanding of the situation.

The change in roles irritates him immensely. Elijah is the one who finds his way out of any situation, a knight in shining armor, straight out of a book. True, his whole breastplate is soiled with blood, and his fangs and twisted smile are visible through the helm, but when have these trivialities ever stopped him from being noble and living up to his status? (He should have been knighted back in the fourteenth century. Then he would still bear that proud title of “Sir.” Just listen to it: Sir Elijah Mikaelson. It’s got a good ring.)

Elijah should have been here in his place, with all the information about the Esther’s illusions. He would have definitely found an escape, a loophole in the spell, as always, but Klaus… But Klaus – what? He fights tooth and nail, trying to win without breaking the rules. Klaus isn’t breaking the rules, just imagine, what a surprise.

He just doesn’t know what to do. He feels useless and terribly lonely, because Elijah is here, but far away, even though they’re trapped together in the latest idiotic reality.

Elijah is behind that notorious wall, and Klaus is slamming against it, like a bird against glass. Just like the bird, he’s smeared and crushed, and his insides slip out of his body in just the same way, leaving behind a cloudy, bloody trail, when he, exhausted and half-dead, slides down its transparent surface. And on the other side, Elijah is not only deaf, but also blind – he doesn’t notice that someone else’s heart has just landed right in front of his legs. Or maybe he’s just purposefully looking the other way. Or the wall is not made out of glass but out of a rude, rough rock, and Klaus the idiot hasn’t noticed.

_Why don’t you see? Open your eyes, brother. _

The biggest difference between Klaus and that bird is that the bird, once broken, will never get up again: it will lie somewhere, a crushed corpse, on the side of the road. Either street dogs will eat it or a car will run it over. But Klaus is none the worse for all this. Despite the glass, the dogs, the car, even all of it put together – he will still get up, against his own volition, and continue onwards. It’s not that easy for him to die.

The bird is damnably lucky with its singular death, and Klaus is pitifully unlucky with his million resurrections. He would prefer to die rather than continue this meaningless, cruel cycle time after time.

Klaus fights, Klaus thrashes about, Klaus goes mad.

Klaus’s ideas are running out, and the stubborn Elijah still doesn’t leave.

**PRESENT** ** DAY** **. MYSTIC FALLS, VIRGINIA.**

Elijah wakes up because he feels a touch on his cheeks.

He doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t move, doesn’t show in any way that he has already awakened. He doesn’t feel any danger: he doesn’t have the instinct to jerk himself upwards and seize hold of the throat of the person who has burst into his personal space so unceremoniously.

Elijah doesn’t feel any danger – Elijah feels Klaus, and that, one would think, is one and the same, but not today, not now. Some kind of strange, sickly despair emanates from Klaus in waves, and Elijah is ready to swear that he even smells that way.

He wants to stretch out a hand in response, to touch the fingers gently stroking his cheek, but he does nothing – he just breathes evenly and calmly, like someone sleeping peacefully.

He doesn’t know whether the moment lasts seconds, minutes, or even hours: the sense of the passage of time, dulled at the best of times, disappears without a trace. It’s as though Elijah is swimming in some kind of jelly, cold and slimy, surrounding him on all sides, and for a second an unbelievably clear image of himself, chained to some kind of dilapidated wall, flits across his eyes, but disappears immediately. Elijah doesn’t have time to latch onto the picture, and it grows pale and washes away, though his instincts are screaming that he shouldn’t allow that to happen.

But reality overpowers him – Klaus leads his fingers down along Elijah’s cheek, slides his knuckles along his chin, gentle strokes his Adam’s apple. Elijah’s heart starts to beat faster, while Klaus stretches out farther, outlining the skin at the collar of his t-shirt with the pads of his fingers, and Elijah involuntarily leans towards the touch.

Something sharp presses against his neck, right between his Adam’s apple and collarbone.

“Good morning, brother.”

Elijah opens his eyes abruptly. Klaus, surprisingly serious and sad, sits opposite him on the bed. The fireplace blazes behind him. In his hands is a white oak stake, pressing into Elijah in that very spot: between his Adam’s apple and collarbone.

Elijah thinks that it would be difficult to call this the absence of danger, and says aloud:

“Morning.”

“You understand that you were the one that forced me to this, right?” for some reason Klaus asks angrily, clenching the stake more tightly in his fingers and pressing just a bit harder, but enough to break the skin. It’s painful, but Elijah doesn’t shout out, doesn’t try to push it away – he knows that it would be useless.

“If you, dear brother,” he begins, with restraint, “believe that I have committed some crime against you and your well-being of which only you are aware, then I would be quite grateful if you would share your concerns with me. To be quite honest, I cannot remember having done anything to deserve such accusations from you or a white oak stake at the throat. Speaking of which, would you tell me how you ended up with it?”

“Oh, believe me, nothing new.” Klaus increases the pressure a little bit more. “You just acted as you always do, but you should’ve changed your habits.”

The stake sticks in even deeper, and Elijah can’t help but wince. The pain increases, while the collar of his pajama t-shirt is stained with dark crimson. Elijah hates it when blood gets on clothes he likes.

“Niklaus,” he calls his brother by his full name, and nonetheless tries to raise a hand in order to grip the stake with his fingers, “I don’t have the faintest idea what you think that I have done. But, believe me, whatever actions of mine you, obviously, considered treachery, were not so.”

“You don’t understand anything at all!” The other almost shouts. “You aren’t supposed to try to convince me that you haven’t done anything, you’re supposed to growl, throw yourself at me, you, you, you…”

Klaus, without removing the stake, climbs over Elijah’s hips in a sudden and rapid movement, straddles them with his knees, and bends over, bringing them face to face – he is angrily biting his lips, his eyes narrowed.

“Remove the stake.” The tone leaves no doubt that it is not a request but an order, but when has Klaus ever followed orders?

“No,” Klaus bares his teeth. “Take it from me. Hit me. Throw me out of here, abandon me, kill me. You can do it right now. Admit it, you’ve wanted to for a long time, no?”

Elijah finally understands: Klaus is provoking him, is trying, for some reason known only to him, to make Elijah hurt him and push him away. Elijah doesn’t know what game the other man is playing, but he certainly doesn’t intend to follow its rules. He will not push his brother away, much less, of course, kill him, though he does in fact have the opportunity at the moment.

“No.”

Elijah shakes his head and spreads his arms to the sides, opening himself up: look, here I am, under you. I’m not going to leave, I won’t dodge, don’t even ask. Kill me if you’d like.

Klaus growls with frustration and plunges the stake into the flesh of his shoulder, but for some reason Elijah no longer feels any pain, he just hears a strange white noise in the background.

**PRESENT** ** DAY** **. NEW** ** ORLEANS** **, LOUISIANA** **. **

Now Klaus is really running out of options. He almost killed Elijah, told him directly that he was planning to do it, but it didn’t help.

He has no new ideas left, no choices, no will to continue running in circles. He feels as though he’s locked up in some perverse likeness of a labyrinth from which there is no hope of escaping. Moreover, he’s not locked up alone; Elijah is wandering around with him.

Elijah, who shouldn’t have the slightest understanding of the situation, but Klaus thinks that it seems as though Esther’s magic has started to weaken. Back then, in the club, he had been almost sure that Elijah was about to understand. It was obvious by the look in his eyes that he didn’t completely believe in the reality of the situation. But it didn’t matter anyway, because he didn’t interpret it at all in the way Klaus wanted.

But, maybe, if he does something even more wild than back then, even crazier and more unacceptable, the glass between them will crack enough that Klaus can finally say everything directly, so that Elijah can understand, can see. That’s his only option, he has no other choice, and Klaus decides to allow his most disgusting filth out to the surface.

When Elijah turns around the corner, Klaus literally throws himself at him, grabbing him by the lapels of his jacket and pressing him into the wall with his whole body.

“Niklaus?” Elijah raises his brows in surprise, dark eyes staring, running his tongue briefly over his lips in an unconscious gesture.

Klaus doesn't need more than that to break.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t make unnecessary scenes or bother with stupid preludes – just kisses Elijah, holding him tightly so that he can’t rip himself away.

He touches their lips together, slides his tongue between them, and, surprisingly, doesn’t meet any resistance. Elijah stands still, not moving, seemingly not even breathing, but Klaus kisses him, incapable of breaking away or stopping. He will probably never get another chance to do this, so what the hell? He’ll take everything he can.

Klaus starts with surprise when one of Elijah’s hands falls onto his waist and the fingers of the other clench in his hair, but not to push him away. The opposite: Elijah sighs into his mouth, drags him closer to himself and, oh god, kisses back. He steals the initiative and slows down the pace, cautiously biting at Klaus’s lower lip, and the sloppy, rough kiss turns slow and unhurried, so impossible that Klaus thinks he’s on the verge of moaning shamefully.

For a few minutes he completely forgets why he’s doing this. He just loses himself in his senses: in Elijah’s fingers, caressing his cheeks, in the lips never ceasing to caress his own, in ragged breath, frissons. Then Elijah descends onto his neck, and Klaus is immediately thrown out of his trance. He can’t allow himself to relax or even to think about Elijah’s reciprocation. Later, everything later – this isn’t the time.

He has too little time. He knows that soon this reality will burst at the seams, he will be thrown into a new one, and Elijah will forget everything. He needs to try his luck.

Pushing Elijah away from him by the hair, he nervously exhales and haltingly starts to speak:

“Listen to me carefully. There’s nothing more important than what I’m about to tell you, okay?”

Elijah, so unbelievably understanding and noble, nods shortly. Obviously, he could tell by the tone that Klaus was serious.

“None of this exists. Nothing here is real.”

He manages to say it aloud, he really manages to say it aloud. When he had tried before it had been as though an iron hand was squeezing his throat, and he had simply been physically incapable of saying a word. But now he can. Esther’s magic is disappearing, dispersing. He has a chance.

“We’re in a magical trap, where…”

Klaus coughs, dry and loud. It feels as though his throat is filled with sandpaper rubbing against its walls, wearing down the lining until it bleeds. It hurts, hurts, hurts, but he doesn’t stop, just gripping his brother’s shoulder more tightly. Elijah, frowning, grasps him more firmly and supports him on his feet. The noble Elijah.

“Esther. She caught us. We’re going from one ring to the next, and you forget ev…”

Klaus is debilitated by pain once again. He cries out, and his fangs drop. He grabs at his stomach and falls to his knees, too weak to stay on his feet, even with Elijah’s help. His forehead buries into his brother’s thigh. Klaus understands: his blood is starting to boil. This is unbearable.

Elijah sits down in front of him, takes Klaus’s face in his hands, tries to calm him, whispers something fearfully. The pain will end if Klaus stops speaking now. He keeps talking.

“You… Don’t remember… Anything about each ring,” he spits blood directly onto his brother’s white shirt. “I remember everything. F-fuck… Go away… Elijah, please, go away.”

“Don’t talk nonsense.” Of course, Elijah can’t just leave him in such a situation. “Klaus, Nik, we need to get you to the witches. I don’t know what’s happening to you, but this is clearly magic. Can you stand up?”

“Elijah!” Klaus snarls with the last of his strength, tearing at his own stomach through the fabric of his jacket and shirt with released claws. “Listen to me! You. Need. To. Go. Away. Right now. It’s… the only way…”

He coughs blood once again, this time staining not just Elijah’s shirt, but his fingers, palms, the sleeves of his jacket. The man seems not to care at all that his suit has been completely and irreversibly ruined – he stands and tries to help Klaus up by the arm, which only makes him even weaker. Klaus cries out again, ripping into his own skin with his claws, tearing, drawing blood. The new pain distracts from the old.

“If you don’t go away right now, then all’s lost,” he wheezes in his brother’s ear, clinging to him with his other hand. “Please, Elijah, I’m begging you, go away.”

“I won’t leave you,” the other answers stubbornly, and Klaus howls dully. He feels how reality is starting to slip away, disperse, disappear. No, no, no, he can’t go through this agony for nothing, he needs to convince his brother.

“Elijah,” Klaus wheezes, pulling himself up with the last of his strength and sinking his bloodied lips against Elijah’s cheek. “Do you trust me?”

His brother is silent for several seconds. Klaus feels how his brother’s fingers clench against his back.

“Yes,” he finally answers, firmly. “I trust you.”

“Then I beg you,” Klaus whispers, slightly turning his head and pressing it to Elijah’s cheek, “go away. Leave me. If you want us to be able… to be able…” it becomes more difficult to speak, “to be able to go back… Please. Leave me.”

Elijah stares at him – frightened, surprised, serious – and then the arms surrounding Klaus disappear somewhere, and he falls to the ground. His awareness begins to fade away, his vision swims, and the last thing that he feels is the touch of hot lips to his forehead, the last thing that he hears, the sound of quickly receding steps.

The white noise never comes.

**PRESENT DAY. NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA. REALITY** **.**

When Klaus opens his eyes, he sees an old stone roof, covered in winding green ivy. The stench of mildew, mold and congested blood immediately hits his nose. He looks around with difficulty. A ball of worry rises in his throat – this is the same crypt where Esther caught him and knocked him unconscious, dragging him off into her damn illusion.

He feels different from the previous, long, long days: genuinely alive – no matter how ironic that sounds, considering the fact that he died at the dawn of time – and that means…

“Welcome back home, my son.”

Klaus turns his head and jumps up abruptly from the floor. Esther stands in front of him, smiling the most tender of motherly smiles that she could muster, and spreads her arms to the sides, as though inviting him into her embrace. Bitch.

“Since you have returned from your journey,” she starts, “I dare to suppose that you and your brother achieved our goal. Tell me, Niklaus, do you understand now that you and Elijah should accept my proposal?”

“I only understand that you deserve death!” he growls, leaping from the spot and throwing himself at Esther, but she puts out a hand and throws him back with magic. Klaus hits his head against stone and hisses from the pain, but that’s not a problem. It’s not difficult for him to stand up and try his luck another time.

“You locked me inside your damned illusions,” he growls again, “you forced me to fight and fight, to repeat everything time after time!”

“There was no other choice,” Esther responds with false regret. “I didn’t want things to go that far, but you should understand, Niklaus. You all…”

Esther doesn’t finish the sentence, but it’s not because Klaus throws himself at her again.

Elijah appears behind her in the blink of an eye. His arm passes through her body, breaking her ribs into pieces. Klaus sees the bloodied fingers, gripping the still pitifully beating heart, and then releasing it after a second. The now-useless organ falls onto the stone floor with a loud smack. Elijah removes his arm, and Esther’s body collapses, a ragdoll with a hole in the chest. Her mouth is open wide in surprise, just like her eyes. It’s customary to close them for the dead, but Klaus wouldn’t think of doing that.

“It’s nice to see the real you, Niklaus,” Elijah says with a light smirk, wiping off his fingers on an ancient white handkerchief.

Klaus smiles at him in response.

***

They arrive home slightly faster than Klaus would’ve liked. They order a taxi from the graveyard to the mansion and go the whole way without saying a word to one another. Elijah interrupts the driver who tries to start up a conversation with them, asking something absolutely trivial about the weather, with a polite “forgive me, sir, but my brother and I would prefer to go home in silence.” The man immediately shuts up – they don’t even have to waste the effort to compel him to slam his mouth shut until the end of the trip.

Klaus is actually happy that they don’t converse, because he is scared to the point of absurdity. He doesn’t know what Elijah remembers. He hopes desperately that the other man forgot their kiss, but at the same time that terrifies him to the core. Elijah might react completely differently. For example, by saying that their “always and forever” was much easier to destroy than it seemed, and going back on his word for the first time in his life.

Klaus doesn’t feel the experience of a millennium of life behind him. Klaus feels only Elijah’s warm hands, laying on the seat right next to his thigh.

In the mansion, they go into the hall where the bar is without consulting one another. They could both use something alcoholic at the moment.

Elijah gets low, faceted tumblers and fills them to the brim with the best bourbon from their collection. Klaus stands a meter away, incapable of tearing his eyes away from the movements of the other man’s hands.

When Elijah hands him a drink, Klaus does not take it immediately. At first he simply doesn’t understand what is wanted from him. His head is empty and hollow, and it seems like his fingers are shaking a little when he nonetheless grasps the slightly misted glass with them. No, it’s as though he never had that millennium of experience at all. Klaus feels vulnerable, cornered, as though he finally had scraped something frighteningly dark out of his soul, and had somehow deprived himself of all his celebrated strength. Maybe that is actually the case.

Elijah tips his tumbler towards Klaus, clinking their glasses in a toast. The sound of glass on glass seems too loud and out of place.

“To victory,” Elijah speaks up for the first time, taking a large gulp immediately afterwards. Klaus doesn’t say anything, just nods and follows his brother’s example. The alcohol burns his throat, but it’s a pleasant feeling. It helps him fall out of the trance he has been stuck in for the last few hours.

Klaus leaves the glass on the bar counter and takes a step towards Elijah. The man doesn’t step back, but doesn’t move towards him either – just puts away his bourbon in a mirroring gesture, after which he hides his hands in the pockets of his pants.

“What do you remember?” Klaus asks. It’s surprising, but his voice doesn’t even shake, and he doesn’t sound like a cornered beast.

Elijah is silent for a little longer than is expected after such a question, and when he finally answers, his voice is quiet and even.

“I remember enough.”

It’s clear that he knows very well what Klaus is talking about, and if he has already ruined everything for good, then why not dance on the ruins? Klaus reduces the distance between them to the usual “too close even for air,” puts a hand on Elijah’s elbow and raises his gaze to him.

Insolent and brave once more, he stretches out towards his lips, but Elijah pushes him away. Abruptly, such that Klaus’s back smashes into the bar, pushing several bottles to the ground, shattering immediately. Liquid pours out across the floor. The sharp scent of strong alcohol hangs in the air, tickling the nostrils and the throat. Klaus doesn’t care. He is hurt, but not because wood bit into the small of his back, while a shard of broken glass pierced one of his palms.

He doesn’t move from his place, though he should. He just closes his eyes, trying to hold back the foul, unwanted tears rising in them, but suddenly feels warmth near beside him, and then a new sharp pain in his palm, from which the fragment is pulled in one abrupt motion. Klaus hisses and twitches, but freezes immediately when Elijah presses his whole body against him, takes his face between his palms and presses lips against his ear.

“Klaus,” he whispers, hoarsely and haltingly. “Promise me that you won’t run away anymore, that I won’t have to chase after you. I can’t chase after you anymore. I need you. Always. Completely.”

Klaus, nervously swallowing and not trusting his ears for a second, nods jerkily. He won’t run away. He has nowhere to go. He has destroyed and defiled the last thing that he could. There’s nothing left for him to do except roll around in his own filth and throw himself at Elijah’s feet. And has he ever wanted anything else?

“Say it out loud,” his brother requests. “I need to hear it.”

Klaus submits, Klaus says:

“I won’t run from you. I promise.”

And then Elijah kisses him, himself. With some sort of animal hunger, almost painfully squeezing the fingers around his neck, biting his lips, grinding his hips. Klaus gasps into the kiss and grabs his brother’s shirt in his hands, climbs under it, scratches at his spine. In response Elijah grasps both of his wrists in one hand and squeezes, not allowing him to move, while the other hand starts the undo the buckle of his belt.

Everything happens so fast that it’s simply thoughtless. They aren’t alone in the house, they could be seen, but Klaus sits on the half-destroyed countertop, spreading his legs, leaning his hips to meet the movements of Elijah’s hands on his cock and moaning into his mouth, and he doesn’t care about the others. He feels something hard pressing into his leg, and it makes his head spin even more than his own arousal – Elijah is hard for him, god, this is really happening.

Everything is unbelievably hot and sharp, with the aftertaste of blood – Elijah bites through his partner’s lip with his released fangs, and Klaus pays him back in kind – and absolutely chaotic. They don’t have even the slightest chance to genuinely control the situation. They have no patience for anything, and they cling to one another with sick despair, with suffocating hunger, trying to take everything at once. Both are just accustomed to doing so, and Klaus will not refuse himself in anything related to Elijah anymore. He needs everything, to the last drop, to the last breath, because, hell, he hasn’t had a chance to touch the way he’s wanted to for an entire millennium, and now… Now he has it. Finally.

The unreality of the situation is only strengthened by the way Elijah hoarsely whispers absolutely incomprehensible, delightfully dirty things in his ear, and completely forgets to restrain Klaus’s hands, so Klaus can touch him everywhere, wherever comes to mind.

He finishes embarrassingly quickly with a dull roar in his brother’s mouth, that is once more atop his own, but his brother isn’t satisfied with that – he removes his hand from Klaus’s pants, quickly licks the sperm from his fingers, and literally drags him by the elbow to the second floor, to the bedroom. Klaus follows him, barely understanding what exactly is happening, with an empty head and some unknown feeling literally tearing at his chest.

Elijah turns around on the way, and his face is still animalistic in its arousal, but there’s a smile on it – impossibly warm and soft. Just as fitting as everything else happening between them at the moment. Because nothing is really changing, Klaus realizes, drawing Elijah into another kiss right in the middle of the staircase.

What they’re letting out onto the surface now has existed in both of them for the last millennium. It sat within them, sometimes surprisingly quietly, sometimes almost trying to gnaw itself a path to the surface, and they just needed to allow it to happen.

They allow it. They kiss one another for the latest, probably already hundredth, time, and Klaus cannot imagine anything more natural.


End file.
